We've been asked by our readers to setup a forum specifically for the Idratek system.  We're glad to announce our new Idratek forum went online at the weekend.  Karam from Idratek has posted an introductory message and he'll be on hand to answer Idratek queries where he can... 

Here's anther great, inexpensive candidate for a home automation server.  The HP DX2250 features a 2.6GHz ATHLON 64 X2 5000+, has 2GB or RAM and a 250GB drive.  It even ships with Vista, although you may like to change that to Windows Home Server or your favourite flavour of Linux.  With the limited time offer of £50 cashback this is a true bargain PC at around £155+vat !

UPDATE - This deal has been extended until the 14th December now, and the max number of units allowed per customer has been up'd from 2 to 3.   Link to the Extended Deal HERE .

Here's a great tip-off from a post on our mailing list this morning.  Dell have the £99 +vat Server deal on again, for today only and limited to 1,000 machines.  The Dell PowerEdge SC440 is a dual core machine with 2 x 80gig SATA drives, a gig of RAM and comes with the Bronze 1 year Next Business Day Onsite Response.  We've just ordered our two (max of two per customer allowed). 

Click HERE for the deal 

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve done this, but a few days ago I decided to draw up a list of my favourite technology from the last 12 months.  As I asked myself what items I had been using on a daily basis, the ones I really couldn’t live without, I came to the realisation that the top ten or more technologies I was thinking of, came from just two companies!  It probably won’t be too much of a surprise to find out who they are, but here is my shortlist for “Top Tech” in 2007…

We all know that systems integration is the single biggest hurdle in building complex smart home systems today.  The Amigo Challenge is putting up thousand of Euro in prize money to encourage submissions to their project.  Watch the video after the jump for Amigos glimpse of an integrated, truly intelligent smart home future...

We've just updated our main news page RSS feed to include images.  You now get special low-bandwidth versions of the images from the intro text of each of our stories. Images are a great addition to news feed browsing, and we recommend Google Reader if you'd like to give it a try...

The iPhone is the best mobile browsing experience we’ve ever encountered, it’s the first phone where you really can navigate normal, proper, full graphical versions of your favourite websites.  However, for the times where you aren’t on Edge or Wi-Fi its also nice to have a fast loading easy to read iPhone formatted version of a site, which is why today we are launching the beta of our own iPhone formatted pages …

Our friends over at ZDNet.co.uk have launched the Homebrew Challenge, a search to find the top home tech project in the UK - "Tell us about your spare-time project, and you could win a Toyota Prius hybrid car worth £20,000.  To enter, all people need to do is go to the competition page and tell us about their project in 450 words or less. Then, if you want to share more detail and really show off your work, go to the Homebrew Blog and tell us more—the history, the challenges, the successes. You can even post images to let people see your handiwork...

With just days to go before the UK launch of the iPhone (Friday 9th November 2007), O2 have decided to drop the 200 megabyte “Fair Use” download limit.  This is good news for anyone considering an iPhone, and good sense from O2.  A few minutes ago T3 Magazine uploaded their un-boxing video showing the UK iPhone for the first time, complete with its new V1.1.2 firmware. 

UPDATE - We've just received the following official quote from Sally Cowdry, O2 UK's marketing director: on the change to the data plan conditions....